Aww, cripes. I didn't know I'd have to write a description. How many words is that so far, like a hundred? Soooo, yeah. Mildly interesting stuff. Stuff that interests you. Mildly. It's in the name, ffs.

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I don't understand why everyone is so scared of skeletons, or why this culture of fear exists around them. They have a fascinating society, you have a greater chance of dying in a car wreck than having your skin stolen by one, and there's a lot that we can learn from them regarding calcium synthesis.

I don't understand why everyone is so scared of dying in car wrecks, or why this culture of fear exists around them. They have fascinating firy explosions, you have a greater chance of dying from being bit by a rabid kangaroo with syphilis than having your skin ripped from your body by a wreck, and there's a lot we can learn about them regarding safe driving.

I don't understand why everyone is so scared of dying from kangaroo inflicted rabies and/or syphilis, or why this culture of fear exists around them. They have a fascinating reproductive cycle, you have a greater chance of dying from being bit by a great white shark than having your skin ripped from your body by a roo, and there's a lot we can learn about them regarding sustainable living in arid areas.

I don't understand why everyone is so scared of dying from being bit by a great white shark, or why this culture of fear exists around them. They have a fascinating teeth, you have a greater chance of dying from being bit by a crocodile which is way worse, and there's a lot we can learn about them regarding sustainable living in ocean areas.

I don't understand why everyone is so scared of dying from being bit by a crocodile, or why this culture of fear exists around them. They have this pretty sick death roll and some Australian man wrestled with them all the time. You have a greater chance of being struck by lightning which is way worse, and there's a lot we can learn about them regarding ambushing prey.

I don't understand why everyone is so scared of dying from being struck by lightning, or why this culture of fear exists around it. It's a truly fascinating display of natural destructive forces. You have a greater chance of being shot in the head by a terrorist. Besides, we can learn a lot from lightning about electricity.

I dont understand why everyone is so scared of dying from being shot in the head by a terrorist, or why this culture of fear exists around it. It's a truly fascinating display of Islamic teaching. You have a greater chance of being hit by Chuck Norris. Besides, we can learn a lot from terrorists about jihad.

I had a completely horrifying experience on acid in college and was convinced that I was somehow slipping from this dimension into another. Even to this day it gives me a chill and nothing quells those thoughts like heating up a small cantaloupe in the microwave, cutting a hole in it, and making love to it slowly for six and a half minutes.

Soap bubbles, following the rule of thumb that atoms arrange themselves as efficiently as possible, are 'stationary' points of various length/area/volume functions, in the appropriate calculus sense that if you were to compute the derivative of these functions at a soap bubble, you would necessarily get zero. When you actually compute the derivative of these functions properly on paper (an exercise in the calculus of variations), the condition that this derivative is zero immediately tells you one thing: whenever soap bubbles touch, the angles created at each intersection point must be the same. In particular if you look at the picture you see lots of lines meet at 120 degree angles (it's 3d so some of these are rotated/depth may alter your perception). Now, why 120 degrees? What stops four soap bubbles meeting to create four 90 degree angles?

Draw a plus sign + on a piece of paper. Consider the four points at the ends of this sign and the following puzzle: is the plus sign the best way to connect these four ends together, in that it uses the least amount of ink?

So, as soap bubbles are as efficient as possible, they too will arrange themselves this way, meaning you will never have more than 3 soap bubbles touching at a edge: if you had four or more it would be more efficient to break it up like I explained above.

TLDR: bubbles always meet in equal angles, and at most three bubbles can be touching any given edge. These rules are what leads to the structure you see in that photo.

The 'rule of thumb' he's talking about is commonly referred to as the minimization of free energy, or in this specific case, minimization of surface free energy.

In simple terms, nature is a lazy bastard and is always searching for the lowest possible energy configuration, or at least the one that doesn't require it to spend enormous amounts of energy to achieve: nature is even lazy when being lazy.

This is the reason the soap bubbles have somewhat hemispherical shape, as this is the shape that has the least amount of surface compared to volume: it's the same reason as to why liquid drops become spherical in space.

However, in a configuration like this one, the parts that take up the most energy are the boundaries between the soap bubbles, which we can refer to as grain boundaries. The minimization of the number of edge states within a reasonably mobile medium will lead to structures similar to the Weaire–Phelan structure, which is the structure with the highest volume/(boundary area) ratio. Of course, again, nature is lazy even in being lazy, so it will not be completely uniform, such as we see in the picture.

However, when given time you will see that smaller soap bubbles will be 'captured' by the larger soap bubbles and the number of bubbles, or grains, will slowly diminish and the average bubble size will increase. This is again such an optimization procedure, as the smallest bubbles are the most inefficient, so they will coalesce into larger ones.

In general I think people don't know too much about surface physics. So I'd say one of the coolest, or maybe the coolest thing in surface physics is the shear amount of awesome structures that surfaces can ply themselves into, if you provide for the right conditions.

And those are just the simple structures that every surface scientist probably knows. You can get really crazy shit, like this Zelda tribute over here which is a very small amount of silver deposited on germanium(111), or an image of a superconducting bismuthoxide that's so strange and beautiful that it's on an art site. These images were all made using one technique, and are only relatively simple substances and structures.

In the practical sense, one of the coolest things that is currently a hot topic in surface physics is topological insulators. These are very interesting substances that are insulators on the inside, but conductors on the surface. They are of great interest for us for a number of reason, and one of them is their potential for electronics: for very complicated reasons, the currents on the surface of these things are independent of surface impurities, which means that you might be able to make extremely low resistance electronics with them. It's a very new field and very hard to explain without any basic understanding of quantum mechanics, but it's exciting stuff.

Anyway, surface physics is one of the physics fields with the most overlap with technological companies and a host of practical applications. Surfaces are important, as it turns out: who'd have thought?

Because when you add up all 5 smaller lines, it's not as much ink as when you add up 4 larger lines. It might look like more ink, and it's not a huge difference, only about 3 percent, but it's definitely less ink!

I didn't show my pythagorean theorum calculations on this paper, but it shows the general idea. 1.41 in the second square comes from 12 + 12 = 1.412 , 1.12 in the third square comes from 12 + .52 = 1.122 . Then, for the third square, you have to add 1 to represent the middle connector peice.
http://i.imgur.com/GSdtWHy.png

I'm scared of spiderwebs (but not spiders) and I didn't know why. That is, until I came onto reddit and heard of trypophobia. And now that I know what it is, I'm trying to get over my fear of it. Reddit's awesome. :)

Because if they were perfectly round, there would be a gap between them, which would be like a kind of inverted bubble. But that bubble wants to be round too. So they all shift to make way, and end up like this.

Despite what most people think, this is also more or less how your alveoli look in your lungs. Most of the time they are represented looking like grape clusters, but if you think about it that's a huge waste of space compared to this.